Warning: this program is not known to work

Why Foxit?

Even though Ubuntu comes with a lot of great applications for working with PDFs, some functionality is not available in the programs installable through the standard repositories, and sometimes people just prefer something other than Evince, Kpdf, or Adobe Reader. Foxit is one of those programs.

How to Install Foxit

Paste these commands into the terminal:

Download Foxit

wget -c http://www.foxitsoftware.com/foxitreader/FoxitReaderLinux.tar.gz

Unzip the archive

tar -xvzf FoxitReaderLinux.tar.gz

Move the executable to a universal location

sudo mkdir /opt/foxit
sudo mv ReaderLinux /opt/foxit/

Make the executable universally available

sudo ln -s /opt/foxit/ReaderLinux /usr/bin/foxit

Now, the command foxit should launch the application.

Remove the original archive

After you test out that Foxit is working properly, you can remove the original .tar.gz file you downloaded with the first command

rm FoxitReaderLinux.tar.gz

Problems

The binary seems to "work" when you launch the program, but once you open an actual .pdf from within the program, the program crashes. This is the terminal output:

username@ubuntu:~$ foxit
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169
  Extension:    145 (XInputExtension)
  Minor opcode: 3 (X_OpenDevice)
  Resource id:  0x0
Failed to open device
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169
  Extension:    145 (XInputExtension)
  Minor opcode: 3 (X_OpenDevice)
  Resource id:  0x0
Failed to open device
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
username@ubuntu:~$ 

The X Error messages can be corrected by commenting few lines in the X conf file. However it doesn't remove the "Segmentation fault".

According to FoxIt Tech support one must be sure the Qt4 libraries are installed to avoid this Seg Fault. I have not yet tried to see if that solution solves the problem. Source: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=5796

Another advanced PDF application

PDFedit is also a popular advanced PDF program.

CategoryDocumentation